Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (18 page)

We know what Scrooge uses his extra time for — turkey purchasing, Tiny Tim saving, charity subscription giving, party game participation, and Bob Cratchit salary raising; in short, fellow feeling for his fellow man, signalled in some cases by the amounts he’s prepared to dispense. We readers and viewers are always pleased when we reach this part of the story: it gives us a warm, comfy, rum-punch kind of feeling, and sentimental tears are shed, by me at any rate. But then the twinkling snow-lit scene recedes, and we close the book or leave the theatre or turn off the
TV
and don’t think much more about it, because the story of Scrooge is after all an outdated children’s tale, and we must get back to grown-up real life.

But let’s stay with Scrooge for a moment, and try a small mental exercise. Some people are in the habit of saying, “What would Jesus do?” Which sounds admirably pious, though sometimes the questioners get curious answers — bomb Iran, screw the poor, burn a church, tell smear-tactic lies about your political opponents, try a little torture, and so forth. It’s kind of hard to imagine Jesus standing over a tied-up prisoner of war and zapping him or her with a cattle prod. Call me an old-fashioned stickler, but in the official texts about him, Jesus is on the receiving end of such tactics, not on the doling-out end.

Most of us are not very much like Jesus, so it’s difficult for us to imagine what Jesus actually would do if he were present in the flesh. But though we’re not very much like Jesus, we are in fact quite a lot like Scrooge. So what would Scrooge do if he were here with us today, and if he faced the problems we ourselves are now facing, not to mention the payback date that’s moving so rapidly in our direction? And if he’d been given extra time to make amends, what form might those amends take? Would Scrooge feel he needed to pay a moral debt to his fellow men, or would he come to realize that there were other kinds of debts to be paid by him as well?

Let’s find out.

AS YOU KNOW
, there are two Scrooges. There’s the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner we meet first in the story about him — I’ll call this one “Scrooge Original,” following the lead of certain soft-drink and potato-chip companies. Then there’s the second Scrooge, the one that emerges after his born-again experience. I’ll call him “Scrooge Lite,” because in the Arthur Rackham illustrations, Scrooge Original is shown crouched over a heavy bag of money, but Scrooge Lite is shown standing erect with both hands open — he’s become open-handed — and he’s happy and smiling, lighter both in purse and in spirit. Modern research backs up Dickens and Rackham — apparently rich people are not made happier simply by having a lot of wealth, but they
are
made happier when they give some of their wealth away. I read about this phenomenon in a newspaper, so it must be true.

If you yourself want to become really happy by using this method, I suggest that you help save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.

It can be done today, that is. Tomorrow it may not be possible, because saving a species from extinction also has a date stamp on it, just like debt and mortal life.

Anyway, those are the two traditional Scrooges: Scrooge Original, Scrooge Lite. But let’s contemplate a third Scrooge: Scrooge as he would be if he were among us in the early twenty-first century. I’ll call this one “Scrooge Nouveau,” because when you’re introducing a high-end quality product it’s just as well to make it sound a little French.

Scrooge Nouveau is the same age as Scrooge Original, but he doesn’t look it. He looks much younger, because, unlike Scrooge Original, he does spend his money: he spends it on himself. So he’s had a hair transplant, and some facial adjustment, and his skin is tanned from the many voyages he’s taken on his private yacht, and his very white and expertly restored teeth gleam eerily in the dark.

I was going to give him a golf course all of his very own, but that wouldn’t work, because a golf course with only one player on it isn’t really a golf course, just as an anthill with only one ant isn’t really an anthill; and Scrooge Nouveau wouldn’t want to play with anyone else, since he doesn’t take to the idea of losing, even in theory. Sometimes he goes hunting and shoots animals, but only from a safe distance. In his recreational tastes he’s much like Machiavelli’s Renaissance prince, though he doesn’t poison people. Or not directly. He only poisons them as a regrettable but inevitable side effect of cost-benefit analysis: it would cost too much not to poison them, and the subsequent lawsuits can be written off as a business expense.

Unlike Scrooge Original, Scrooge Nouveau isn’t cantankerous, or not on the surface. There’s a book out now that tells you how to get very, very rich by acting like an
A
— dollar sign, dollar sign —
H-O-L-E
, but Scrooge Nouveau is already very rich, so he doesn’t have to act like an
A
— dollar sign, dollar sign —
H-O-L-E
. He did have to act like one earlier — that’s how he got very, very rich — but now he has people who do that for him. So he’s not gruff and surly, and he isn’t rude to charity seekers, the way Scrooge Original was. If he doesn’t want to see such people, he’s simply in a meeting.

If today’s corporate laws had existed in 1843, Scrooge Original would have had a corporation instead of a firm — so much more protective for him! — but the limited-liability corporation didn’t appear until 1854 and didn’t achieve its full complement of legal tools until the late nineteenth century. So Scrooge Original was a partner in a firm — Scrooge and Marley, it was called. From the order of the names we assume that Scrooge was the senior partner and would have had the corner office if he’d gone in for such things. But he didn’t: Scrooge Original’s office was as dismal and dingy and stingy as everything else about him.

But Scrooge Nouveau lives in the twenty-first century, so he does have a corner office, and he doesn’t have a firm. He has a corporation. In fact, he has many of them. He collects them — it’s a hobby of his. He doesn’t much care what they make, so long as they make money.

Some of Scrooge Nouveau’s wealth has gone to the four ex-Mrs. Scrooges that feature so prominently in celebrity magazines about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Two of these ex-wives have given bitchy tell-all interviews about Scrooge, who likes this kind of attention, in moderation, because he likes anything about himself. But it’s not his fault that he’s a self-centred narcissist: he grew up surrounded by advertisements that told him he was worth it, and that he owed it to himself. He’s on his fifth Mrs. Scrooge now. She’s twenty-two, a stunning girl with very long legs. He owes it to himself, because he’s worth it.

These common twenty-first-century locutions come, of course, directly from the language of valuation — worth it to whom, and how much? — and also from the language of debt. Scrooge owes it to himself — he’s his own debtor and creditor rolled into one. What has he borrowed from himself? Time and effort, we suppose — the same time and effort that have allowed him to increase the fortune he inherited from Scrooge Original through Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. So now he can pay himself back by giving himself this mysterious “it”— usually whatever’s in the ad. He owes “it” to himself, but, by extension, he doesn’t owe a plugged nickel to anyone else. That is his view.

We join Scrooge Nouveau in his lavish villa, somewhere in — where? — let’s say Tuscany, though he’s thinking of selling this joint because the neighbourhood’s getting cluttered up with tycoons of lesser worth than himself whose show-off globs of architecture are ruining the vistas. Mrs. Scrooge the Fifth is in Milan, shopping for state-of-the-art stiletto heels. Scrooge Nouveau has spent the afternoon with one of his
CEOS
, whose name is Bob Cratchit — an overpaid and useful but envious and cringing little suck, in Scrooge Nouveau’s opinion. Cratchit has a brash, badly dressed wife and a mob of obnoxious children, the youngest of whom, Timmy, is a prodigious whiner. Scrooge regularly ignores Bob’s hints that this horde of snivelling Cratchit moppets be invited to swim in his pool.

It’s evening. Scrooge has enjoyed a modest dinner of Chilean sea bass — an almost extinct fish, but delicious, and anyway somebody’s got to eat it, because it’s already dead, so why waste it? He’s relaxing over a mellow but fruity and audaciously nosed postprandial glass of (fill in the vintage yourself), when he hears a foreboding sound and smells a horrible smell. The sound is a wet, slurping, sucking sound, as of someone trudging through a swamp; the smell is the smell of decay. And the whole sideshow is coming up the marble staircase of the villa, straight toward him.

What was in that bottle of (fill in the vintage yourself) anyway? thinks Scrooge. He casts his mind back to his youthful days of drug experimentation. He barely has time to process his inner defence —“I never inhaled!”— when his former corporate partner, Jake Marley — dead these many years, having had a heart attack on the treadmill in the hi-tech corporate gym — materializes in the armchair facing his. Wound around him and trailing on the floor is a long chain made of stinking fish, wildlife specimens that are falling apart, and the skulls and hair of developing-world peasants.

“Jake!” says Scrooge Nouveau. “You’re dripping on my priceless oriental carpet! What are you doing here anyway, and why are you wearing that trash heap?”

“I wear the trash heap I forged in life,” says Marley. “You ought to see yours! It’s three times as long and stinky as mine. And I’ve come to warn you, in order that you may escape my fate. Three Spirits will visit you.”

“Do they have appointments?” says Scrooge Nouveau, vowing that if they do he’ll fire his executive assistant. “I can’t see them. I’ll be in a meeting.”

“Expect the first Spirit tonight when the clock strikes one,” says Jake Marley, vanishing in a puff of stench. Scrooge looks out the window, sees a lot of decomposing codfish flying through the air with a chair of the board attached to each one, takes a shower in his marble bathroom to clear his head, pops a sleeping pill, and conks out in his authentic and costly seventeenth-century four-poster bed.

None of this keeps the first Spirit from appearing at his bedside at 1 a.m. sharp. She’s female — a pleasant-looking damsel, clad in green, with a wreath of flowers in her hair. She looks like an all-natural-and-organic-shampoo ad. Maybe this won’t be so bad, thinks Scrooge. “Care to join me?” he says to her, indicating his bed. He owes this to himself. The fifth Mrs. Scrooge need never find out, and if she does, so what — he can afford her displeasure.

“I am the Spirit of Earth Day Past,” says the Spirit. “Rise, and walk with me.”

Scrooge is about to protest that he needs to put on his thousand-dollar customized running shoes if he’s going to do anything as challenging as walking, when he finds himself yanked out the window and flying through the air.

“There wasn’t any effing Earth Day in the past!” he barks at the Spirit, now that he’s had time to think about it.

“Such a day was not needed,” says the Spirit as they glide above the clouds. “Imagine taking only one day in which to honour the Earth! It’s like Mother’s Day — dump a card and some flowers on the old hen once a year, then exploit her the rest of the time. But in ancient societies, the debt we owe to the Earth was remembered at all seasons. Each religion paid tribute to the sacredness of the Earth, and acknowledged with gratitude that everything people ate, drank, and breathed came from it through providence. Unless people treated the gifts given by the natural world with respect, and refrained from wastefulness and greed, divine displeasure would follow, signalled by drought, disease, and famine. In addition to that, earlier peoples felt they had to pay back what they’d received. This is where the idea of sacrifice came from: human sacrifice, in certain South American tribal cultures, is still referred to as ‘feeding the earth.’ The prevailing ethos was that there was a debt, and it had to be repaid, and repaid regularly, or the benefits that were given would be withheld.”

Scrooge is annoyed with himself: he shouldn’t have raised the subject and let himself in for such a big chunk of self-righteous preaching. “Where are we?” he says. They seem to be caught in a flickering maze of light and darkness.

“We’re moving through Time,” says the Spirit. “Backward. Close your eyes if it makes you dizzy.”

“Well, anyway,” says Scrooge. “Civilization advanced. We grew out of that crude sacrifice stuff. We approach things rationally now, what with science, and cost-benefit analysis, and the use of debt as a sophisticated investment vehicle, and . . .”

The Spirit smiles. “Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,” she says. “Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run. The rationality you cite dates back a mere two centuries, when people began substituting something called ‘the Market’ for God, attributing the same characteristics to it: all-knowingness, always-rightness, and the ability to make something called ‘corrections,’ which, like the divine punishments of old, had the effect of wiping out a great many people. Enlightened people came to believe that the Earth was nothing more than an assemblage of machines, and therefore that everything in it, animal life included, existed only to be re-engineered to do Man’s will and work — like a water mill. Even in the early twentieth century, the scientists were telling us — for example — that animals had no emotions, and could thus be treated as if they were inanimate objects. Which was much like what used to be said of the lower classes in England, and of slaves everywhere.

“However, the sense of a living Earth persisted into fairly modern times, if only via the language. When a person died, it was said, ‘He has paid his debt to Nature.’ In other words, the physical body had merely been borrowed — never owned outright — and death was the means whereby the loan was paid back. Which is literally true, as long as the relatives don’t cremate the corpse, or seal it into an airtight burial vault. But if it’s allowed to dissolve, and return to the elements . . .”